Leg restraints dangle from the injection table where the condemned prisoner is executed in San Quentin State Prison.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Leg restraints dangle from the injection table where the condemned...

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The new injection chamber at San Quentin is part of the state's response to a 2006 order by a federal judge halting executions.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

The new injection chamber at San Quentin is part of the state's...

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Phones inside the chamber can be used in case of a last-minute stay of execution.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Phones inside the chamber can be used in case of a last-minute stay...

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Observers will view the executions through a set of glass windows. Officials from San Quentin State Prison display the newly completed Lethal Injection Facility, on Tuesday Sept. 21, 2010 in San Quentin, Calif.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Observers will view the executions through a set of glass windows....

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Jeanne Woodford, a former San Quentin warden, backs an end to executions in California.

(03-05) 11:51 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- For the third time in 40 years, Californians will likely vote in November on the death penalty, a practice that has had at least as much impact on the state's politics as on its institutions of crime and punishment.

Opponents of capital punishment said Thursday they were submitting 800,000 signatures on petitions for an initiative to close the nation's largest Death Row, which has 725 condemned prisoners. The measure needs 504,760 valid signatures to make the ballot.

"California voters are ready to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no chance of parole," declared Jeanne Woodford, who oversaw four executions as warden of San Quentin State Prison. She now heads the anti-capital-punishment group Death Penalty Focus.

It was an unusually optimistic statement in a state whose residents have consistently supported the death penalty. The most recent Field Poll, in September, showed 68 percent support - although respondents in the same survey, when asked their preferred sentence for murder, backed life without parole over death, 48 to 40 percent.

The last time the issue was on the ballot, Californians voted by a 71 percent majority in 1978 to expand a death penalty law that legislators had passed the year before over Gov. Jerry Brown's veto. When the state Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, voters overrode the decision by a 67.5 percent majority.

The court itself was shaken in 1986 when voters unseated Chief Justice Rose Bird and two colleagues who had regularly voted to overturn death sentences. Since then, the California court has had one of the nation's highest rates of upholding death judgments.

Eroding support

Nationally, support for capital punishment has declined somewhat, possibly in response to falling crime rates and DNA exonerations of Death Row inmates. Several states have repealed the death penalty - New York by court ruling in 2004, New Jersey and Illinois by legislation in 2007 and 2011. But it has not been done by ballot initiative since 1964, when Oregon voters overturned their state's death penalty law. It was reinstated by another ballot measure in 1978.

In California, "when the death penalty comes up as a political issue, it comes up as a question of basic sentiment: Which do you prefer, murder victims or the people that killed them?" Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley law professor who has written extensively about capital punishment, said in an interview.

Sponsors of the initiative hope to reframe the issue as a question of wasteful spending at a time of financial crisis.

A 2008 study by a state commission headed by former Attorney General John Van de Kamp concluded that the death penalty was costing California $137 million a year for trials and appeals - far more than other types of cases - and the maintenance of Death Row. Substituting life without parole would reduce the cost to $11.5 million, it said.

A study last year by Arthur Alarcon, a federal appeals court judge, and Professor Paula Mitchell of Loyola Los Angeles law school put the death penalty cost even higher, at $184 million. Since California reinstated the death penalty in 1977, the report said, it has spent more than $4 billion, which works out to $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since 1992.

Costs challenged

Death penalty supporters challenge those figures. Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said the cost estimates are based on needlessly protracted appeals. He said future cases should take less time and money because of recent restrictions on federal court review of death sentences, and pointed out that life terms carry costs for housing and medical care.

The initiative would set aside $100 million of the projected savings over three years to investigate unsolved rapes and murders. It would also require convicted murderers to work in prison and send their wages to the state's restitution fund for crime victims.

The death penalty consumes "millions of dollars that can be put toward keeping our teachers, police and firefighters in their jobs," said Gil Garcetti, a former Los Angeles County district attorney who supports the ballot measure.

Sponsors of the initiative highlighted support from onetime death penalty backers like Donald Heller, the Sacramento lawyer who wrote the 1978 death penalty initiative. "I made a terrible mistake 34 years ago," he said Thursday.

Staying out of it

The state's two most prominent death penalty opponents, however, are staying on the sidelines.

Brown - who declared in his 1977 veto message that he preferred "a society where we do not attempt to use death as a punishment" - is taking no position on the initiative, said spokesman Gil Duran. The office of Attorney General Kamala Harris, who as San Francisco district attorney had a policy against seeking the death penalty, had no comment.

Regardless of the November vote, executions in California have been halted by court order since February 2006 and are unlikely to resume for at least another year.

After blocking a scheduled lethal injection at San Quentin, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose held hearings and ruled that poor staff training and monitoring and haphazard procedures posed an undue risk of a breakdown that would subject an inmate to a prolonged and agonizing death, in violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The state has revised its rules and built a new death chamber, but says it will not be prepared for court review until the end of this year.